One Last Thing

i'm obsessed with water, but i hate dry sand and crowded public beaches, and i don't like jellyfish or sand crabs or those little fish that swim around your ankles at the shore down in the carolinas. i used to vacation in maine, and so i prefer the north atlantic, where the water is cold enough to turn your lips blue, and doesn't have things living in it close to the shore. if there aren't very many people around, i can deal with the sand for that.
everything i thought of for this project sounded like a postsecret confession. that wasn't really my intention, but i like it regardless.
the half-transparent text in the background is "sea-fever" by john masefield; that layer was done in photoshop, as were the colors and effects on the background picture. everything else was a mixture of photoshop and illustrator: the ship's wheel, anchor, and seashells were all flat graphics gone over with live trace, cleaned up and emptied of fill with live paint, and placed over found photographic images before a second cleanup in photoshop. (it was more complicated than it sounds.)

Grid Design

all of the components of this are little symbols of me in some way. "chirikli" is a gypsy word for 'little bird,' hence also the sparrow. four of the letter images are works of some favorite artists (by cicely mary barker, amy brown, bouguereau, and mucha, in that order); the others are a tiger lily, water, a ladybug, and the wings of a monarch butterfly. i began with a 9x9 square, and from there made each of the smaller squares with whichever of the images fit in to that space's letter, choosing the colors for the solid squares afterwards.

First Memory

it was a little tragic.
all the images were found except the baby; that's really me. the lawn, deck, kiddie pool, and rope swing in the background are all from photos found online, and the cake and flowers were colored in and meddled with in illustrator.

I like flowers.

these are all from my own photographs.

Hometown.

The top left, obviously, isn't a real street sign. I pieced it together; that's my high school's emblem. Minus the ship. And all of the things in the marquee sign are very true.

Anastasia: Composite

The base image here has actually almost nothing to do with the name Anastasia - it just happened to be made by a DeviantArt user who shares the name with me. All the same, I chose it because it offered me an interesting (and clever, I thought) way to work in the other images. My admiration of Tudor-style architecture was really just an added plus. The other images were favorites culled from a vast number of Romanov portraits and movie posters (though, admittedly, I did use one of each). Beginning with the photograph of the violinist, I chose window or wall panels in the original picture that suited the shapes and sizes of the new ones, and used the Magic Eraser and Background Eraser tools to remove all but the frames. The smaller pictures (some, like the rose at the bottom middle, having needed size editing first) then went in one by one, as new layers beneath the original. I cleaned up messy edges as I went, and once all were in, a few went through Photoshop filters to add some interest. With that done, it seemed to me that the background behind the edited house was too bland, so I went back to a fresh copy of the original picture and erased out the house itself. I put the background through a filter and pasted it over the composite. The text was an afterthought, as I felt the image would be more coherent if my name were actually included in it. The French is a definition - it reads "of Greek origin - she will rise again." (It didn't look as good in English.) Last of all the layers were flattened, and that was that.